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(Coffee) Shop Talk

“Welcome to the shop where I talk about things that go well with coffee, which is almost everything.”

17 March 2007 What Price a Cat?: The Confused Musings of a Humanist Agnostic Druid

FOXNews.com – West Virginia Man Accused of Decapitating Cat as Part of Satanic Ritual

I mean really. Did he think this was a good idea at the time? Was he really trying to appeal to Satan, or did he fall in with the wrong crowd? I’ve always wondered about Satanists. I guess it has the whole dark, forbidden thing going for it, but…well, either you’re basically asking if you can pretty please go to hell, or you’re drawing strange symbols in the park and disemboweling cats just for the heck of it. I’m not the biggest cat person in the world, but I’m kind of opposed to disemboweling anything, especially if you aren’t going to eat it.

In Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder offers some interesting insights into Voodoo. He quotes Paul Farmer explaining how most Voodoo rituals, scary as they may sound with all the wailing and chanting and drumming, are trying to ward off sickness. I’m not saying that Voodoo is synonymous with Satanism; I don’t really know much about either. I just wonder if the cat sacrifice had a similarly benign purpose. It looks cruel, violent, and disturbingly weird to secular and mainstream-religious people, but obviously at least one person thought it would be a good idea. He was seen lurking around the area days before, so it wasn’t just an impulsive thing. He obviously took steps to keep the cat quiet, or there would be a lot more than one witness linking him to the event. If hundreds or thousands of people in modern-day Haiti still think Voodoo rituals will help them, and if some in Mexico (according to a recent NPR report) still pay warlocks to cure them of illnesses and ward off bad luck, why shouldn’t a guy in West Virginia think that a pentagram and a mutilated cat will make his life better? Of course, the fact that he’s in jail right now inclines me to think that he didn’t get the results he was after, unless the ritual was for someone else. What would have to be on the line before you would think it worth the life of a cat?

Why sacrifice cats to Satan? Why dance around a fire and shout to the gods? Why sit in rows and sing in unison to God, then pass a plate around to collect money? God gets money, Satan just gets dead cats. Aside from the net worth of our sacrifices, are we that different at the core of things?

moon cat